Yum! to pump in $100m to swell its outlet count

Yum! Restaurants, the American quick service restaurant (QSR) chain, is set to invest over a $100 million to take its restaurant count in India — Pizza Hut, KFC and Taco Bell — to 1,000 by 2015.

The company is also looking at employing 50,000 people by then, Niren Chaudhary, managing director of Yum! Restaurants, told a group of reporters here on the sidelines of the India Economic Summit. The company currently has 160 Pizza Hut restaurants, 120 KFC outlets and one Taco Bell outlet in India.

“Our vision is to have 1,000 restaurants by 2015. It is four times what we have now. We have one Taco Bell store in Bangalore. We are looking at opening another two by this month-end in Bangalore and another five next year. We will have more than 100 KFC outlets in the next couple of weeks. We are going as per plan,” said Chaudhary.

Asked about the rising input cost pressure, he said, “Rising input cost is a challenge for all businesses in India and the only way to tackle it, is to constantly innovate and give new offers to consumers on a regular basis. But we would make sure that whatever we do, we offer a really compelling value proposition for consumers across all our brands.”

Painting an upbeat picture of the company’s growth, Chaudhary said, “All our brands are recording double-digit sales growth, but I will not be able to disclose specific sales numbers. We are profitable in this country. Sales would go up by five times from the current run rate in the next five years. Globally, India is an extremely important strategic market for Yum! Restaurants, though right now our share in the overall global turnover is very small. Compared to more than 3,000 restaurants in China, we have only 300 restaurants in India. But we believe we will have a very bright future here.”

Yum! Brands is the world’s largest restaurant company in terms of system restaurants with more than 37,000 restaurants in over 110 countries. The company, together with its subsidiaries, operates five QSR companies under the KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, Long John Silver’s and A&W All-American Food Restaurants brands.

“At present, we are not looking to bring our other chains to India as we are concentrating on the three existing brands here,” Chaudhary said.

With inputs from Vivek Seal and Manisha Yadava)